Oracle Blog

Chris Gerhard's Weblog

Thursday Oct 02, 2008

I've been having a conversation with
some colleagues about how to communicate announcements within Sun and
rather than do this via email I thought I would go a bit off topic
for this blog and post it here.

Why I think a blog is a good place to put announcements.

Email

Email provides a fantastic one to one
or one to many communication medium but only if the “many”
are all known to you. Sending out large announcements via email is
likely to cause large numbers of the potential audience to ignore
you. If you want this sort of broadcast medium I would suggest a
blog.

Blogs

Blogs being largely write once and then read only are a great way
to put out announcements so that they can be subscribed to by users
using the blog's RSS feed and consumed either by a blog reader or
even by thunderbird so that they look like emails. Or you can read
them directly via the web or via a blog reading web site like
google.com/reader. They will get indexed via search engines and so
can be found by occasional readers while at the same time those who
want to can subscribe to them to get the latest news or views when
they are posted.

Wikis

There are wikis and there are wikis so to some degree the question
as to when they are good and bad depends on the wiki. However I've
not found a wiki yet that has a really good RSS feed for handling
announcements. They are great for cooperative working or for
community documentation (eg wikipedia) but for announcements they
lack concise RSS feeds or notification methods that don't either
suffer from too much noise (changing a single typo results in the
entire page being in the RSS feed) or don't send enough updates (the
feed is per page so having an announcement per page does not produce
a good stream of announcements). Some wikis allow you to build
complex RSS feeds based on search criteria that may allow a feed to
be built but this is really for a power user and so I've not found it
suitable for announcements.